4 thoughts on “Just One of Those 24-Hour Periods”

Update: GDI! The comments are acting up. So now my weird bad luck is effecting others. This sucks.

Original post:

haha — I hope not!

Fortunately, the damage was minimal. Almost everything I've worked on since 8/15/06 is on my laptop, and almost everything from before 12/04 was on my old harddrive that's still functional. Plus, often for printing reasons I've been gmailing myself important stuff.

While attempting to fix my computer, a friend ended up taking out a lot of dust and lint, plus the new 250 gig external hd I got from BestBuy for $129 is nice.

Still, there's no question this is more annoying than not. Worst of it is I've lost a /lot/ of mp3s — many of which were purchased from itunes (thus no physical media), other cds of which are in South Dakota (thus far away from me).

Fortunately, online backups (*cough*) are readily available, but it's still a pain.

The death of Windows XP on my machine fates the old thing to become a Linux bos. Right now I'm backup up everything from the 80 gig internal to the 250 gig external after booting up with Insert Linux [1] (a small live cd with great filesystem support). After that's done, I'll install Suse Linux 10. [2]

Because they're also open source[3], Firefox, OpenOffice, and the rest will work on Linux too.

I wanted to try Ubuntu because of Aaron's recommendation, but my experience with Gnome (“desktops for the mentally handicapped”) left something to be desired. Not that Gnome didn't support advanced tweaking, which it doesn't, but that it doesn't support anything sane. For instance, the default behavior while viewing your harddrive is a new window for EVERY FOLDER. Why? Because Gnome hates you. That's why.

So I put up kubuntu, which is supposed to be a KDE (“desktops for normals”) version of ubuntu. Again, it sucks. User experience is significantly below what it was two years ago with Suse (another KDE distribution). Kubuntu randomly drops resolution, angrily refuses to play sound, freaks out when a usb 2.0 harddrive is connected and recognized (which isn't often, because it rarely recognized it in the first place), has a terrible package manager interface, etc.

Kubuntu is on par with Corel Linux from what — 1999?

I'll be a sport and try Ubuntu, but a word for anyone else considering linux: avoid kubuntu like the plague.

I'm about to make an “I endorse Hillary Clinton” level flip-flop. No, I'm not going to agree with John Stuart Mill. Nothing that terrible. But everything long-time friends thought they knew about Dan tdaxp will change once they learn…

I like Gnome.

I don't know if kubuntu's problem was the current state of KDE, or just their awful implementation of it, but the world has turned upside down since the last time I used KDE and Gnome. In Gnome, everything just works. Games — actually work. Sound — actuall works. And — this is just revolutionary if you've spent any time in the special hell that is kubuntu — if you plug in a usb drive —– GNOME LOADS IT IMMEDIATELY. Yup. Plug & Play — as opposed to kubuntu/KDE's “plug and pray” (harharhar).

I hereby take back EVERYTHING bad I said about gnome above. The past two years have been truly kind of gnome, if also a long, cruel joke of kde/kubuntu.

Yes… yes! Bicker back and forth about the superiority of one linux distro vs another, one window manager vs another… the whole while your infighting will cause your inevitable collapse and destruction… and once you and those like you are purged from the earth… the monolithic, take it or leave it Windows will still reign supreme. Yes! Yes!